USA deploying attack drones to South Korea

Guy Reyes

Acting Assistant Secretary of State Susan Thornton made the comments during a Foreign Press Center briefing on Monday where she previewed Secretary of State Rex Tillerson's upcoming trip to Seoul, Beijing and Tokyo this week.

A USA missile defense system, THAAD, is being deployed to South Korea in the face of threats from the North.

And now that South Korean President Park Geun-hye has been impeached and formally removed from office, South Korea's government, with a campaign for a new president in the offing, will be in no position to pursue new policy options - hard-line or otherwise - for a number of months.

The latest drill comes after the North continued to carry out missile provocations in defiance of global condemnation. "But, no, this is not something that's being singled out with regard to North Korea". Not only has the Democratic Republic of North Korea (DPRK) recently flaunted its long range missiles, but its assassination of the supreme leader's exiled half-brother - which South Korea correctly described as an act of terrorism - shows that Kim Jong-un is in no mood for diplomatic compromises. "There is no need to wait for two months [before the election of the next South Korean president]", he said on the sidelines of the political sessions in Beijing.

Over the past year, technological advances in North Korea's nuclear and missile programmes have dramatically raised the stakes.

The U.S. would like to see all three Asian nations join with Washington to confront North Korea, but the tangled relationships among them make that hard.

Chinese reactions to the fast-forwarding of Thaad's arrival in South Korea have been fierily nationalistic. Imagine then, in such a context, China announced it was installing a high-tech missile defense system costing billions of dollars in Mexico, close to the USA border.

US Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Joseph Dunford said any conflict with North Korea would inevitably be "trans-regional, multi-domain and multifunctional"-in other words, a world war involving other powers and the use of all weapons, including nuclear bombs". "We support THAAD deployment because right now North Korea and China are pointing their missiles at us".

South Korea's political upheaval has also created an opening for China.

The Izumo helicopter carrier, commissioned only two years ago, will make stops in Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines and Sri Lanka before joining the Malabar joint naval exercise with Indian and USA naval vessels in the Indian Ocean in July.

The UN report warns that North Korea's "ability to hide financial activity by using foreign nationals and entities allows them to continue to transact through top global financial centers" (like Malaysia, Singapore and China). "But underground facilities first have to be found and then have to be struck by precision munitions - finding things is the potentially hard part - North Korea denies a lot of information to the outside world", says Bruce W. Bennet, a senior defense researcher at RAND Corporation.

Meeting with senior Trump administration officials in Washington last week, Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman twice referenced the growing threat posed by North Korea's missile programs preoccupying the White House in its first days on the job.

Toshiyuki Shikata, an emeritus professor at Teikyo University in Tokyo and a retired lieutenant general of the Japanese Ground Self-Defense Forces, cited another reason the US won't be able to conduct the first strike against Pyongyang.

The council report was the first by Ojea Quintana, who is from Argentina, since he took the post previous year.

The annual US-South Korean Foal Eagle field training exercises are taking place simultaneously and are set to last until late April. Thus far, however, the Trump administration has not articulated a strategy.

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